The House Guests Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    In the spring of 1946 Dorothy came home from the Mandeville Market with a kitten from George’s next litter. Two cats are better than one. Their reaction to each other adds an extra dimension of cat-watching. Then would not three be better than two? I do not think so. I think that at three and beyond they tend to set up a social order which diminishes the importance to them of their relationship with humans, and thus lose a certain responsiveness, tending more to become cat’s cats rather than people’s cats. In other terms, the cat by instinct tends to establish itself with a co-operative living arrangement known as a pride when one speaks of lions. With proper trust established, the cat will make the unnatural adjustment of accepting the huge, two-legged beasts as members of the pride. Two cats will accept and confirm this disparate relationship, but when there are three or more there is enough quantity for the formation of the instinctive community which can then consider the nearby humans as bond servants, furniture, and infrequent sources of clumsy entertainment.
    Roger spent about thirty seconds reacting to the newcomer as though it might be an exceptionally large and dangerous bug. Roger was beginning to be a boy cat, rangier and more agile. We could not guess what his response would be. He astonished us by becoming almost idiotically maternal. He washed the kitten day after day into a strangely sodden state. Hewas almost consistently gentle with it, enduring its fierce little needle-toothed games, but sometimes his own kittenhood would get out of control, and he would bat the little fur ball across the kitchen floor until it yelled with consternation and alarm.
    I remember how we named the new one. I had a dictionary with lists of first names in the back. We went through the list of male names to find one which might fit properly with Roger. We did not have to go very far down the list. To Dorothy, to Johnny, and to me the name Geoffrey had precisely the right ring.
    A different tom had fathered that spring litter. In vastly oversimplified terms, Roger was a long blue cat and Geoff was a square brown cat. It never failed to astonish us that some people had difficulty telling them apart.
    Geoffrey became a chunky cat, his shoulders and forearms considerably more massive than Roger’s. His face was broader, forehead higher, nose dark. The short fur on his face had a definite red-brown tinge. His ears had Lynx tufts Roger’s did not. His belly fur had a pale buff tinge. The shape of his jowls was more leonine. Roger’s head configuration can best be described by saying that sometimes he is known as Old Turtlehead. Where the line of Geoff’s back was quite straight, Roger’s narrow hind quarters stand higher than his shoulders. People who despise cats always found it easier to despise Roger, even though—if it is the distillation of catness they so instinctively fear—Geoff was the more primitive, the one ever more aware of the obligations of his profession.
    All three of us were, I must confess, thinking of these cats as temporary. Not that we had any idea of disposing of them, but rather because we had the dual pessimism of thinking that something always happens to cats—and something always happens toour animals. We had the feeling cats are temporary despite the example of Nicky, a husky, square, black and white, businesslike cat owned by Dorothy’s paternal grandmother in Poland, New York. Nicky was then in his teens, and, whether he was at home at the old house in Poland, or up at the family cottage at Piseco Lake in the summer, it was his nightly habit to slay his quota of rodents—moles, shrews, mice—and place them in a curiously neat array on the porch, side by side, heads all pointing in the same direction. Nicky, a mighty hunter, had elected himself provider and made it his business to forage for his pride, his community. That the offerings were not accepted in the spirit they were